Google Updates Street View with New Navigation Methods

Posted 06/05/2009 at 12:36pm | by Paul Lilly

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Navigating with Google's Street View just got a whole lot easier, and it's all thanks to the double-click. Rather than being limited to using the forward and back arrows, you can now double-click on a new place or object and warp-speed your way to that location.

"As you move your mouse within Street View, you'll notice that the cursor now has a lightly-shaded geometry attached to it - it will show an oval when your mouse is following a road and a rectangle when moving across the facade of buildings," Google wrote in a blog entry. "We affectionately refer to this cursor geometry as the 'pancake' because it has the appearance of a pancake laying flat to the object where the mouse is pointing."

Google says its pancake method gives users a sense of depth in an otherwise flat image, and we found that to be the case while playing with the new controls. The new method works well, not only for quick long-distance jumps, but also for auto-rotating the camera view if you, say, click on the front door of a house while looking down the road.